My Wife Left Me the Farm and a List of Instructions. The Last One Was the Hardest to Follow

“Don’t you dare spend the rest of your life alone, Harold Whitaker. I mean it.”

I didn’t cross that one out.

I put the pad back in the drawer and didn’t open it again for a long time.

People think loneliness on a farm is dramatic. It isn’t.

It’s eating supper standing up because sitting at the table feels wrong. It’s talking to the cows more than you talk to people. It’s the radio playing in the barn just so there’s another voice.

Then last summer, the farm next door changed hands.

It had belonged to Arne Carlsen, a stubborn old Norwegian who’d been my neighbor for thirty years. Arne passed in the spring, and his farm went to his younger sister.

Her name was Ruth.

I’d met her once, decades ago, at a church picnic. She left for Milwaukee when she was eighteen and became an emergency room nurse. She’d been gone so long that people in town spoke about her like a rumor.

Now she was 63, retired, and suddenly the owner of 160 acres she had no idea what to do with.

The first time I really saw her, it was a hot afternoon in July.

I was coming back from the feed store when I noticed a figure standing in the middle of Arne’s hay field, next to his old red baler.

She was kicking it.